All the same, after a time Olive began to feel sorry for Mr. Cotterell, and to pity him for the very errors of his past life, about which she now saw that he was penitent without wishing to explain to her why. Also she had very much enjoyed meeting him; he was so fresh, cultivated, and original, in his conversation. It was really very dull sometimes with no one to talk to, and the long hot day shimmering by, making her feel as if she were a potato being slowly baked in a hotair oven. There was no excitement in the house-work and—and it was very dreary sometimes. Men delight in reverting to primitive savagery. The most highly civilized man “reverts” in a way which is surprising both for completeness and for rapidity, but women hate the process. Savage woman was a slave, and the more completely a woman becomes subject to primitive conditions the more closely she resembles a slave, and is in virtual bondage either to some human being or to hampering circumstances. Of appropriate companions of her own sex Olive had absolutely none. Mary Winkle was a rigid reformer, a person all angles, of the sort that never becomes a companion to anyone, for she was always on the war-path, and, besides, between her and Olive there was an unexpressed, but no less real, antipathy. Her daughter, Willette, that creature half boy, half girl, and wholly wild, was always on horseback careering after stray cattle, and though by her ignorance and eccentricity she sometimes amused Olive, she had really no ideas beyond those very concrete ones impressed upon her from without by her open-air life on the prairie. Mrs. Carpenter was a good soul, but a mere stout housewife, with no ideas and only one hope, namely, “that Carpenter would give up his high-fallutin’ notions, an’ go back to York State, an’ settle down comfortable again, an’ be a preacher in a Baptist church.” Mrs. Ruby was old in body, but the youngest of them all in mind, except Uncle David, who was her senior by four years. Mrs. Ruby believed in Perfection City, though she reserved the right of private judgment on certain of the tenets of its founders, and in particular, she had lately felt misgivings as to the worldly wisdom of their principle of non-resistance. She knew, however, that the Pioneers were going to show the world the new and better way—the way which led into no competition for supremacy, but into peaceful paths of universal progress. Property and its attendant imps, greed, strife, jealousy, envy, hatred, and malice, were all banished from Perfection City, and in their place peace and good-will and perfect trust in each other were to reign forever. It was a high ideal, but not a new one. It was eighteen centuries old, though it had never yet been realised. Mrs. Ruby and Uncle David felt sure they had reached the ideal, and all through Madame Morozoff-Smith, the most whole-souled, unselfish, glorious woman of her century. It was a pity she had not a larger theatre in which to present before mankind